"Life Cycle Assessment as a decision-making tool for process design" - M2P2 Seminar

According to the Handbook of Life Cycle Assessment, LCA is usually defined as the “compilation and evaluation of the inputs, outputs, and potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its lifetime”. This technique allows the environmental impacts from the entire lifetime of the product to be determined and compared, as a function of their energy production potential. The methodology of LCA consists of four main sectors: the goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation.

For sustainable design, technology developers need to consider not only technical and economic aspects but also potential environmental impacts while developing new technologies.  Techno economic analysis (TEA) evaluates the technical performance and economic feasibility of a technology. Understanding of the trade-off between economic and environmental performance is crucial for sustainable process design, which is not fully available if TEA and LCA is performed separately.  In contrast, integration of TEA and LCA enables systematic analysis of the relationships between technical, economic, and environmental performance and provides more information to technology developers for trade-off analysis.  Integrated TEA-LCA tool can also reduce inconsistency between system boundaries, functional units, and assumptions that can arise from using standalone TEA and LCA findings in decision making.  There is also growing interest of prospective application of integrated TEA-LCA tool to evaluate emerging technologies at early technology readiness level (TRL).  Integration of TEA and LCA is still an evolving area and requires further exploration to develop a consistent methodological guideline.